Physics & Engineering Physics Colloquium

Ronald L. Koder, Ph.D., the James Peace Professor of Physics at the City College of New York, will present “Utilizing Disorder in Natural and Designed Proteins and Enzymes.”

The largest destabilizing force in biopolymer folding is the inescapable configurational entropy loss in going from a disordered unfolded state to an ordered folded state. One way that the energy is minimized in evolution is by using the minimum degree of order in the folded state that is necessary for a specific function. Koder will outline his experiments in introducing this disorder in designed electron transfer enzymes; his utilization of disorder to create high signal sensing platforms that we have used to detect chemical- and bio-terror weapons, cancer biomarkers, and cytokines central to COVID-19; and recent biophysical analyses of the human protein elastin— the protein responsible for the elasticity of arterial walls whose entropic elasticity is critical to cardiovascular function.